


dear gravity, you're holding me down in Starling City

by millepertuis



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-28
Updated: 2013-04-28
Packaged: 2017-12-09 20:17:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/777579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/millepertuis/pseuds/millepertuis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Felicity doesn’t want this to eat her up. She wants to maybe get a cat, and curl up in bed on the weekend, and rewatch the Ninth Doctor episodes of Doctor Who without worrying that the world is gonna end because she took a break.</p>
            </blockquote>





	dear gravity, you're holding me down in Starling City

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kikibug13](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kikibug13/gifts).



> Title adapted from Fall Out Boy's song, _Tiffany Blews_.

Felicity wakes up, goes to work, gets a call from Oliver, saves the day, provides some much needed comic relief, and goes home.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

 

 

She remembered the story from the news; nothing life-changing or anything like that, of course. Just a story. They’re always just stories. People disappearing at sea, runaway teenagers, murders… It’s sad of course, it’s always sad, but eventually their faces and names fade from memory. You’ll probably recall the story if someone ever brings it up, but you never really think about it.

Felicity wasn’t even working at Queens Consolidated at the time, and if it stayed in her mind longer than strictly necessary, it’s mostly because they were from her city, and because there was something about the girl—Sarah Lance—, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on that reminded her of one of her cousins, maybe in the way she smiled in the photo on the news, young and carefree and _happy_. Felicity couldn’t understand how you could be this alive, and then just be—gone.

She remembers how it slowly disappeared from the news, went from being the front story every night to just a quick update once a week, to nothing anymore, until the day they were all officially declared dead.

She wonders if there’s still a grave somewhere for Oliver Queen, if his family still visits it sometimes. If maybe they feel like in some ways he never truly came back.

But this is the only Oliver she knows.

 

 

“Are you okay, honey?” her mom asks her over the phone on Friday, and she really isn’t. She needs to talk about it, this vigilante thing, but of course she can’t _talk_ about it.

“I just—sometimes, I don’t know what’s the right thing to do, you know? How do you know for sure?”

“Did something happen?”

“No, it’s just something that came up at work, and I don’t know what to do.”

“Well,” her mother goes on after a pause, “I suppose it’s about the greater good?” Felicity thinks briefly of _Harry Potter_ , of Dumbledore and Grindelwald, and she shifts in her seat, uneasy.

“What’s best for the most people, I mean,” her mother is carrying on. “But mostly, I think you just—you have to do what sits well with you, and hope you made the right call.”

“I—Thanks, Mom. I’ll do that.”

She takes a sip of wine. She wonders if her mom would say the same thing if she knew. Probably. But what does she know? Felicity doesn’t have kids.

“You know you can talk to us,” her mother says eventually. “About anything.”

“Yeah, I know.”

 

 

Felicity’s always been fairly normal, she thinks. Sure, there’s the whole genius thing, but she’s never been the completely asocial type, and knowing her way around computers is way less weird than PTSD, God complexes and bow fetishes.

(Although she’s starting to get where that’s coming from. But that’s mostly for The Hunger Games and girl power reasons. Oliver’s arms are great, but they’re not _that_ great.)

So she’s going to get out. They’ll find Walter and then she’ll get out. She’ll have to quit her job, move away probably. Maybe somewhere sunny. She’d like that.

She’s not like Oliver, is the thing, or even Diggle, who likes to pretend he’s sane, but really isn’t. She doesn’t carry scars like they’re heavier on her soul than on her skin. She’s not a martyr. She wants to be a good person, and she mostly is, she thinks—she gives her seat to older people on the tub and she gives money to charity when she can. But she’s not going to die for the cause or something, and she’s certainly not going to die for Oliver Queen. Felicity’s very much afraid to die. She’s dreadfully common that way.

She just—she doesn’t want this to eat her up. She wants to maybe get a cat, and curl up in bed on the weekend, and rewatch the Ninth Doctor episodes of _Doctor Who_ without worrying that the world is gonna end because she took a break. She doesn’t owe anyone anything, least of all her life. Oliver—Oliver is not a whole person. He hides it well, until he doesn’t anymore. He already lost too much of himself to this war he’s waging. He’s doomed. He and Diggle both—they must realize that. Their heroism condemns them just as well as terminal cancer would. And she’d know: that’s how her grandfather died.

 

 

After the incident with Oliver’s psycho girlfriend—her words—, he gets her a–

“–a panic button? Really?”

She entertains the thought of kicking Oliver in the shin for a second before she realizes the panic button’s actually an excellent idea.

“Why are you giving me that?” she asks with a blank face so he doesn't see it coming.

“To, you know, if you’re in danger, or even if you just have a really bad feeling about something, so we can come and res–” Diggle coughs, “–help,” Oliver rectifies hurriedly. “So we can help.”

“OK.”

“OK?” he repeats warily.

“Yeah, sure. Makes sense. Where are yours?”

“Ours?”

“Yeah, so you can tell us if you need help.”

“I–”

“You don’t need help? You can take care of yourself?”

“Well, yeah?”

“Oh, so I can’t?”

“Well, it’s just that you’re only at the beginning of your training and–”

“I can’t tell if this is a guy thing,” she interrupts him, “where you can’t show weakness or whatever, or a martyr thing, where you, I don’t know, can’t admit that you’re not invulnerable and have to carry all the weight of the world on your shoulders.”

“I—What?”

“Because, either way, you’re not Superman.”

“I know that,” he utters defensively.

“What if you walk into a trap, an ambush, whatever? Or if there are witnesses and you can’t do anything without revealing your identity?”

“That’s—a pretty good point,” he admits.

“One more panic button coming right up,” Diggle agrees with a cheerful expression, from his seat, on the other side of the room. She glares at him. “Two,” he corrects, “two more coming right up.”

 

 

She gives away little pieces of her soul; Walter disappears and Oliver’s heart stops beating and a madman puts an explosive collar around her neck. She keeps going.

(If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one to hear it—)

 

 

“What if—”

“Yes, honey?” her mother prompts her. Felicity’s been circling around this conversation for ten minutes. She just can’t let it go, she doesn’t know why. She didn’t feel this way after the thing with the bomb around her neck, or after the thing with Helena Bertinelli. She hasn’t even talked to Oliver today.

“What if the right thing to do isn’t what’s right for you?” she finally blurts out.

“What is this about, Felicity?”

“I can’t talk about it, Mom.”

“We worry about you, you know?”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t know what else to say. She can hear her mother sigh over the phone.

“I remember, with your grandfather, at the end, when we had to decide whether to take him off life support or not—it wasn’t easy, is what I’m saying. I had to break away from what I wanted to do and respect his wishes. You’ll have to make choices like that in your life, and sometimes you’ll feel like there is no acceptable outcome. But I think we did a damned good job raising you, and I trust that you’ll do the right thing. You just have to look past today. Every choice you make will stay with you for the rest of your life, and I want to know that every morning, when you get up and look in the mirror, you’ll be as proud of who you are as your father and I are.”

She sighs again.

“It’s just a job, baby. I understand it must be easy to lose sight of that, sometimes, working in such a big company. But it’s just a job. You can get another one, if it comes to that. Any company would be lucky to have you. And your father and I, we’re always here for you, if you need anything, you know that, don’t you? You know you can always come back home, honey.”

“Yeah,” she manages to get out, her throat tight and her eyes a little wet.

 

 

She remembers how her grandpa withered little by little until he was but a shell of the man who used to carry her on his shoulders for hours when she was younger.

She had felt relieved when he died. She doesn’t want to ever feel that way again.

 

 

Felicity likes the quiet, has always been comfortable with silence—often prefers it, actually.

At the cave, though, it’s a _loud_ kind of quiet that irks her skin and twists her insides, makes her long for Oliver and Diggle’s playful back-and-forth. Here, quiet means they’re gone, means they’re out of her reach. Oliver and Diggle go out and fight adversity and all that, while Felicity stays behind and hopes—hopes they won’t be reckless and get themselves killed, hopes she hasn’t missed a quite literally _vital_ piece of information and sent them to their death, hopes they’ll live and come home— _back_ , come back to fight another day.

It’s not fair.

 

 

The first time she goes after a bad guy herself, because Oliver and Diggle won’t get there in time and she can’t just let him get away, Oliver looks upset when he sees the bruises on her face, and starts talking about how maybe it’s time they part ways. “I make my own choices,” she tells him unequivocally, because she does, and it’s important he learns that, she can’t go on if he doesn’t learn that. “I’m not gonna be another weight on your conscience, Oliver.”

He searches her face for something, she doesn’t know what; after a while, he smiles to her like he tries to mean it. It’s not enough, of course. Felicity’s always wanted more from life than a guy whose smile never quite reaches his eyes—Felicity’s always wanted more from life than a guy, period.

It’s not enough, but it’s not nothing. It’s not worth nothing.

 

 

Life goes on. She gets leads on Walter’s location that don’t actually lead anywhere. Oliver makes up with his BFF. Diggle finds his brother’s murderer. Oliver’s BFF’s father is Very Bad. Oliver fights with his BFF. She keeps training with Diggle. Oliver gets an apprentice that none of them seem to actually like—except for Oliver’s sister, which is at least 75% of the reason why Oliver really doesn’t like Harper. Helena Bertinelli reappears, murders a few people, disappears again. Oliver makes her and Diggle hit water. Thea Queen gets in on the secret.

It kind of all goes downhill from there, secret-wise.

 

 

There’s no big epiphany. She doesn’t wake up one day and realize this is what she’s been missing all her life; she knows this is going to either break her or kill her—or both, she thinks.

Probably both.

But what’s important to understand is this: she had a happy childhood, good parents that she calls twice a week, best friends and first loves and all that. Still, when she arrives at the cave after walking in on Walter and Mrs. Queen making out behind the counter—she doesn’t want to sound like a middle-schooler, but… gross—and she finds they’re all already there, Laurel and Diggle sparring good-naturedly, Oliver absently correcting Merlyn’s stance and his grip on the bow while they’re both giving the stink eye to Harper and Thea who resolutely ignore them and keep flirting; she feels like she came home at last.

 


End file.
